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<p>This study examines contemporary Pashto poetry as a critical cultural site where collective trauma, identity, and resistance are articulated under conditions of prolonged militarization and political marginalization in Pakistan. Drawing on Cultural Trauma Theory, the study conceptualizes poetry not merely as an aesthetic form but as a mode of cultural knowledge through which communities narrate suffering, contest dominant power structures, and preserve collective memory. Focusing on the Pashtun regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the analysis explores how poetic discourse represents state violence, surveillance, displacement, and the transformation of Pashtun identity into a securitized and suspect category. Using qualitative textual and thematic analysis, the study examines a corpus of nineteen contemporary Pashto poems produced in the post-2001 conflict context. The findings demonstrate that Pashtun poetry functions simultaneously as testimony, critique, and resistance by exposing the normalization of violence, the marginalization of Pashtun voices, and the unequal valuation of life and death within dominant national narratives. Through metaphor, imagery, silence, and symbolic inversion, poets reclaim narrative agency and challenge imposed representations of Pashtun identity and history. The study further shows how poetry operates as a cultural counter-archive that preserves alternative memories and perspectives often absent from official narratives of war and security. By foregrounding poetic expression as a site where cultural trauma is articulated and contested, this research contributes to trauma studies, postcolonial literary scholarship, and South Asian cultural studies, demonstrating how marginalized communities employ poetry to resist erasure and articulate alternative moral and political imaginaries beyond securitized frameworks.</p>

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Poetry as Counter-Archive: Cultural Trauma, Militarization, and Narrative Agency in Pashtun Lived Experience

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月9日

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  • Awrang Khan

摘要

This study examines contemporary Pashto poetry as a critical cultural site where collective trauma, identity, and resistance are articulated under conditions of prolonged militarization and political marginalization in Pakistan. Drawing on Cultural Trauma Theory, the study conceptualizes poetry not merely as an aesthetic form but as a mode of cultural knowledge through which communities narrate suffering, contest dominant power structures, and preserve collective memory. Focusing on the Pashtun regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the analysis explores how poetic discourse represents state violence, surveillance, displacement, and the transformation of Pashtun identity into a securitized and suspect category. Using qualitative textual and thematic analysis, the study examines a corpus of nineteen contemporary Pashto poems produced in the post-2001 conflict context. The findings demonstrate that Pashtun poetry functions simultaneously as testimony, critique, and resistance by exposing the normalization of violence, the marginalization of Pashtun voices, and the unequal valuation of life and death within dominant national narratives. Through metaphor, imagery, silence, and symbolic inversion, poets reclaim narrative agency and challenge imposed representations of Pashtun identity and history. The study further shows how poetry operates as a cultural counter-archive that preserves alternative memories and perspectives often absent from official narratives of war and security. By foregrounding poetic expression as a site where cultural trauma is articulated and contested, this research contributes to trauma studies, postcolonial literary scholarship, and South Asian cultural studies, demonstrating how marginalized communities employ poetry to resist erasure and articulate alternative moral and political imaginaries beyond securitized frameworks.